VEXICON 4: Desire Anyway

leave something

Remember

Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore. In many desire-based texts there is a ghostly, remnant quality to desire, its existence not contained to the body but still derived of the body. Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanness.  — Eve Tuck

SKATE POR VIDA

DON'T MAKE ME 

& PRAYERS

!?

Axis Mundi

Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had "changed." Only recently did I come to see them as the opposite, evidence of how California had "not changed," and to understand "change" itself as one of the culture's most enduring misunderstandings about itself.  — Joan Didion (1934-2021)

BE THE

and I promise

Out Of Order

RULES

ANYWAY

not allowed without the written

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose,

And nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free,

— Kris Kristofferson

SOLIDARITY

FOXES HAVE DENS

Love is composed

THought I MIght

Outline RED

STREET FEED

VEXICON drifts freely among the public Lexicon: signals from the edge of center, 2020-2021.  VEXICON 4: Eugene Oregon Jul-Dec 2021.  Previous VEXICONICS on this blog: Oct 9 2020, Jan 25 2021, Jul 2 2021. In ordinary revelation truth be told. 

NOTES

— In memory of Joan Didion (1934-2021). Above excerpt from Where I Was From (2003)  

— Eve Tuck, from Suspending Damage in Harvard Educational Review (2009) evetuck.com

— Kris Kristofferson.  According to the Rolling Stone, Kristofferson was inspired to write “Me And Bobby Mcgee” after seeing Federico Fellini’s 1954 film La Strada, Italian for "the road.”

And the time will come when you see we're all one

And life flows on within you and without you

— George Harrison

EDGES: Being Solstice

Edges::Becoming Solstice::White River SE Nevada

Consider Charles Foster’s wonderment:

The winter is the time of palpable edges: viable/doomed; black/white. Tree spikes stab the wind. In fact, everything in the natural world is about edges. … Yes, there is a whole, but a whole that's complete only because of the vibrant individuation; because of the edges. 

… We think that we're in a fast-changing world. Well, perhaps, but humans aren't changing in the way that the Upper Palaeolithic changed us. What we think of now as change is angst and dissolution. The changes on our watch are not the multiplication and refinement of nuance or the deepening of understanding. They are acts of vandalism: the spoliation of things, places and modes of being that are ontologically superior to us. 

...

Charles Foster.  Being A Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness.

2021. p69-70

Glyphland: A maze-like journey

“Rock inscriptions at Roosevelt, Washington, except for one maze-like inscription covering several square feet of rock surface, are nondescript and have apparently little value as an archeological key.” — Herbert Krieger, Ethnologist, 1927 Columbia River survey for the Smithsonian

Glyphland: The strange story of a century of speculation and promotion, and the unlikely journey of the Roosevelt, Washington, petroglyphs.

In sum… In the early 1920s an Oregon newspaper announced discovery of “Picture Writings” near Roosevelt, Washington, on the Columbia River. A popular 1921 volume, Oregon, provided drawings of petroglyphs from the site. In 1928-1929 The Oregon State Motor Association promoted it as destination for vacationers, via ferry from Arlington, Oregon.

Thus began “Glyphland” and nine decades speculation, promotion, displacement, and documentation. The John Day Dam project in the 1950s and 1960s sparked relocation of 27 of the riverside basalt boulders to a civic park near Roosevelt. After forty years and visits by thousands, neglect motivated a 2003 move under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers, in consultation with tribal and park representatives, to Horsethief State Park (now Columbia Hills), across from The Dalles, Oregon. 

In 2012 these 27 boulders, cleaned then moved again, joined other petroglyphs displaced by The Dalles Dam in the 1950s to become part of the Temani Pesh-wa Trail. Today this display, along with the nearby Tsagiglalal petroglyph, is a popular heritage attraction.

"maze-like" boulder situated at Horsethief State Park since 2012 -- its fourth move since the 1960s.

(Figures lower right also originally from Columbia River near Roosevelt.)

NOTE: For this paper and others:

https://independent.academia.edu/DouglasBeauchamp

Robert Bly, in gratitude

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap. - Novalis, translated by Charles E Passage

So opens News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. This anthology, chosen and introduced by Robert Bly and published by Sierra Club Books in 1980, was re-issued in 1995. 

Bly concludes the preface to the re-issue: 

If we do love spiritual intellect and the soul of the world, we need to resist the forces that want to dishonor Nature. The consciousness of Nature now is more generous than ours.

NPR: Poet Robert Bly dies at 94

Stone, Petroglyphics, Northern Great Basin

Photo Douglas Beauchamp 

By 2100

Was it that—a sense and beyond intelligence?

Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond

Intelligence?

On what does the present rest?

-Wallace Stevens, 1947

The distress is mine.

As to our troops returning, I have no news—

news to report if I got wind of it—

nor have I public business to propose;

only my need, and the trouble of my house—

The troubles.

-Homer, The Odyssey

… in the clear noon light

now as then

our eyes may rest

the primal world is still

only the sun burns

and the expanding moment

we know those ancient watchers

beneath the hill

-Frances Horovitz, 1970

As global heating oscillates, one signal among many of the accelerating bio-collapse, imagine: By 2100. Or, ease into it, By 2030?  By 2050? Or, Bye and bye in 2100…

Imagine: On what does the present rest?

CODA

The sea doesn't change as the earth changes;

It doesn't lie.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me

And it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

-Louise Glück, 2009

Tule Lake/Lava Beds photos Douglas Beauchamp 21st c. Click to enlarge

NOTES

-Wallace Stevens,from the poem The Pure Good of Theory, in Transport of Summer, 1947.

-Homer. The Odyssey, from Book II A Hero’s Son Awakens. trans. Robert Fitzgerald

(Homer tells when Telémakhos entered into the room, the grey-eyed “Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace that held the eye of the multitude.”)

-Frances Horovitz, from the poem Dunskeig (Hill of the Fort), in The High Tower, 1970 (and Collected Poems, 1985, Bloodaxe Books UK)

-Louise Glück. from the poem March, in A village life, 2009.

The Event Horizon: Beyond 2020

Event Horizon: “The gravitational sphere of a black hole within which the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. By extension: A point of no return.” [wiktionary]

Vanishing lines never arriving that make visible the tiny throws of chance. We linger forewarned: The Event Horizon: Always Closer Than May Appear.

Gratitude for the phrase that make visible the tiny throws of chance to British poet Peter Redgrove from his poem Pure Chance. The last four lines of the poem:
Thus the pictures flat on the boards grow solid:
Snakes and laddering branches, the snaky wind
Coiled into the oaks, hissing. He walks free of them
Out of the wood on to the meadows of pure chance.

All photos Eugene Oregon 2020 Beyond; click to enlarge. 

Mapping Future Ancestors

Arrival as circle. Journeys become legends, fusing time, places, memory. This presence appears dynamic, a glimmer of larger cycle. As I observe a variety of petroglyphs of a morning in a spring canyon I see figures marking presence. Occasionally a rock art motif appears as a temporal mapping, a narrative of journey, mimicking a path of movement.

This petroglyph may story a cycle or an arrival. he image may be metaphoric, indicating thresholds of personal emergence. To know oneself. The looping circle may indicate family, group ties, relations, bondedness. It may function as remembrance or to assist remembering as a mnemonic device. A journey may be imagined or anticipated as future event, a new era. Making worlds visible. An invocation and guide to future wayfarers. An inspiration.  

My speculations framed with my own projected logic surely miss the intention of the maker. Standing back, standing forth, for a sunrise, I am lucky to share her or his vision.

Linear Process: poem by Gwen Nell Westerman

Our elders say

the universe is a

circle.

Everything 

returns to its

beginnings.

But where do we go

from here? 

Where are 

our beginnings?

                        Our parents were stripped

                        of their parents
                        names tongues       prayers,

                        lined up for their meals

                        clothes      classes tests.

                        When it was our turn 

                        to come into this world,

                        they did not know
                        what family meant

                        anymore. 

                        They did not

                        know.
                        Yet even 

                       from here, 

                      we can 

                     see that the 

                  straightest line

                on a map

               is a circle.

Who will say the circle poem in 2120? As Peter Brannen reminds is: “No animal in the history of the planet, and possibly in the visible universe, is ever found itself at so consequential a crossroads as ourselves.” I wonder, crossroads as point on a circle?  How do we speak of now and then?  

If there is an ancestral tense to poetics, a pastpresentfuture tense embodied a vision, it may well be Joy Harjo’s poem A Map to the Next World. Here, the last gleaming lines of the poem: 

    We were never perfect.

    Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

    once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

    We might make them again, she said.

    Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

    You must make your own map.

Where will a future-ancestor-poet place on the map? An aspirational songline of anguish, love, longing? Will there be a map? Or a vast cycle? 

Joy Harjo, beginning her third term as the nation’s Poet Laureate, will continue her project Living Nations, Living Words, launched November 2020. In her narrative to this interactive ArcGIS Story Map, Harjo says: "Now, we have a map. And you have learned you can begin anywhere. Know that this is only a thin portion of destinations, with few representations of the scope of Native Nations poets, and poetry of place. However, it is a beginning."

NOTES

[1] Gwen Nell Westerman, in Follow the Blackbirds (2013), Michigan State University Press. Also in New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018)

[2] Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World (2017 HarperCollins).  A Colorado-based writer, Brannen’s recent (The Atlantic, March 2021) overview:  The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record

[3] Joy Harjo.  “A Map to the Next World" from How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001 (2002, WW Norton) 

[4] Living Nations, Living Words. About.  View MAP

[5] Background:  Joy Harjo, Blaney Lecture, October 9, 2015:  Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets. 

CODA

Joy Harjo: 

Vkvsamet hesaketmese pomvte
Mowe towekvs pokvhoyen yiceyvte
Mon vkerrickv heren
Pohkerricen vpeyeyvres
With praise for the Breathmaker, by whose intent
We arrive here, and by whose grace we leave.

Drought and Unknowing

Boat ramp. Reservoir full pool elevation 3235'. Ramp extends down to 3210'. Level last week 3158'.  Vertical drop 48'. 

Tree cut down for reservoir; underwater since 1961.

All photos and data week of Sep 19-23 2021; click to enlarge.

Prineville Reservoir, Crook County, Oregon, impounds Upper Crooked River. Looking east from the dam. 21% full.

Spillway from dam. 

Ochoco Irrigation District operates the dam and Prineville reservoir, owned by the US Bureau of Reclamation, primarily for irrigation. OID, which set October 1 as the end of the 2021 water season, also operates the older and smaller Ochoco Reservoir, currently 12% full, inflow zero.

Past-Present-Future envisioned as Now.

A hazy Unknowing: changes in the watershed in the last 60 years: clear cutting, fires, diversions, expanded cattle grazing, plantings, etc. Unknown patterns will determine water availability and uses as we move deeper into the 21st century.

John Berger distinguishes between the unsaid and the unsayable.  Following him, we distinguish between unknown and unknowable. What is unknown can be known over time and within parameters yet to be determined.  What is unknowable cannot be known. We wonder, what times these in this prickly thicket of precarious negotiation?

How will Future emerge bearing a tenuous Present and a weighted Past? How similar; how differ? In this light, the expanse of a watershed and the life of a river becomes emblematic.

Crook County, in the center of Oregon, mapped as Exceptional Drought: Exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses; Shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies. Assessment derives from: Drought severity, soil moisture, streamflow, and precipitation, with estimated short term and long term durations.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/AbouttheData/DroughtClassification.aspx

Equinox: Same Moment Round the World

Fleeting balance. Fleeing balance. Yet one moment all are equal under the Sun and below the Moon. Equinox.

Petroglyph, basalt outcrop facing east, date unknown.

Near Three Corners: Place of convergence of the imaginary borderlines of Oregon California Nevada  --  Northern Great Basin, part of the traditional country of the Northern Paiute.

During the equinox, the Sun crosses what we call the “celestial equator”—an imaginary extension of Earth’s equator line into space. The equinox occurs precisely when the Sun’s center passes through this line.
https://www.almanac.com/content/first-day-fall-autumnal-equinox